Inbox Placement: The Metric That Beats Delivery Rate

Inbox Placement

Inbox placement is the percentage of your sent email that lands in the primary inbox rather than spam or the promotions tab, the truest measure of whether your email is working.

Why it beats delivery rate

Delivery rate says the server accepted your mail. Inbox placement says which folder it landed in. Mail can be delivered and sit unseen in spam, so placement is the number that reflects reality. The inbox placement topic covers how to triage a placement drop.

How it's measured

Since your own logs can't see the recipient's folder, placement is measured by seeding a message to real mailboxes across providers and reading the folder distribution. Run an inbox test before a big campaign.

How Nitrosend measures it

Placement is measured against a first-party pool of about twenty real seed mailboxes across Gmail, Workspace, Outlook, Office 365, Yahoo, and Apple, with per-provider trends over time. Open rate is noise. Placement is the signal.

FAQ

What is inbox placement?

The share of your email that lands in the primary inbox rather than spam or promotions, a truer measure of deliverability than delivery rate.

How is inbox placement measured?

By seeding a message to real mailboxes across providers and reading the folder distribution, since your own logs can't see placement on the recipient's side.